Buried Shoreline

by Hillary Gravendyk

 

woods threaded with smoke   shredded           sky mist furling through             needles
of trees these               woods are wooded                      too.

snuffling dog rooting   water    gooey rocks loon           sits long along one long
leg         a shore            edgeless             tumbling into ocean then        trickling green
patches              as river             bed and there are          rivers    buried under rotten     logs

Peaks shorn       in swathes, twinned     against something grey that might        be weather
or           a kind of cloth.                             a sound like a low         cry                      a cry

we are moving between these lookouts           the shore the                 forest     a
sense of watching       through                car windows                  they are              each finger
each                   other nail          crudded                          damp    red splinter of bark
milled with                    moss wet soil                  and on the same bed                  tiny shells

dead mollusk husk when the rock is lifted                     white                                 as gull
shit        or mooncrater                              fossilized droplet canyon        made fast

these rocks       dried sea                         charcoal blue                 if we lifted a red          log
              shedding         softly along the grain of itself                               would there be teems
of beetles                      crushed snailshell          mushrooms       dry sand pink    and blue  ?

driftwood flares up      like candy           pulled  across                an outpost of coastlines
crusted              on moving water and we find                more coast slid               under the deck

clam trails erase           wetly    the sandspout  candlewax at the palest              touch you
              think you are                 the master of looking keep                    looking

 

 

 

as if an echo

by Hillary Gravendyk

 

I’ll be
 
            suspense of weather between milky mirrors                   cloudmud caught blearing
 
                                                                                 Some fine-ness of         pine

                                                                                 limb              bristles in limb

 

 

 

Answers to Sensual Questions

by Hillary Gravendyk

 

Some of the time         what glows in late light
                                                     or moves against the blades of gate-wood or grass
                                                                                                                                                    is not
                                                                                                                                    what happens:

always again                 seeds blow and suspend, alight
                                                     in whatever motes become, at rest
                                                                                                                                        what’s seen
                                                                                                                                   describes you:
                                                                                                                              variable for place

~

The light rustles,
             disputes the hillside in early Spring
                            circles a jelly-jar of still water,
                                                     tumbling.   And down
                                                                               the fire-road of suspicion, clues:

~

Elsewhere and here                 automatic nature unsoiled by growth
                                                                               ground silver with the mechanisms
                                                                                                                           of freighted things
                                                                                                                                  managing flight

such solutions                           dispel into a bright stillness
                                                                                pick the heart’s lock and there is only light,
                                                                                                                                     weed furrows,
                                                                                                                                   something late,
                                                                                                                                         and moving

 

 

Hillary Gravendyk passed away on May 10th, 2014, after a long illness. She was the two-time winner of the Eisner Prize in Poetry and the author of a chapbook, “The Naturalist” (Achiote Press 2008), and the full-length book “Harm” (Omnidawn 2012). Her poetry appeared in journals such as The Colorado Review, Fourteen Hills, MARY, and other venues.